Java Sweet and Hot

Coffee is good and good for you. Hallelujah! I am celebrating with a cup of Poor Richard's blend coffee from Reading Terminal Market. Life is good.

I was so happy to read this article today. How much do we love coffee? We love coffee so much that we write songs about coffee. Coffee songs below.

Good to know that our love for that first cup in the morning is not in vain. And that drinking another two or three cups may have health benefits.

The illustration is a vintage tin sign. You can find more signs of this type HERE.

Why Coffee Is Good for You
Kris Gunnars, Authority Nutrition

It is more than just dark-colored liquid with caffeine. Coffee actually contains hundreds of different compounds, some of which have important health benefits.

Several massive studies have now shown that the people who drink the most coffee live longer and have a reduced risk of diseases like Alzheimer’s and diabetes. Read more ...

PETS - A Bunny Cop and Songs for Easter

Happy Easter!

I really like this Officer. I would like to make him my Pet. I want to stroke his ears. The photograph gives me odd erotic palpitations. 

“As for me I will follow the path of the pink bunnies.”― Magenta Periwinkle

Notes from Wikipedia: the Writer's Friend. I send them a small amount monthly to keep Wikipedia free. 

James Clarence Wakely was an American actor, songwriter, country Western music vocalist, and one of the last singing cowboys. He wrote the song he is singing in this vintage film. During the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, he released records, appeared in several B-Western movies with most of the major studios, appeared on radio and television, and even had his own series of comic books.

Little Bunny Foo Foo" is a children's poem and song. The poem consists of four-line sung verses separated by some spoken words. The verses are sung to the tune of the French-Canadian children's song "Alouette" (1879), which is melodically similar to "Down by the Station" (1948) and the "Itsy Bitsy Spider".[1] The person performing the song usually includes hand gestures, e.g. for "scooping" and "bopping".[1]





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Bede's Beat Redux - 10th Anniversary Edition

 April Fool for Love 

“I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.” - Kurt Vonnegut

"Everybody plays the fool, sometime. There's no exception to the rule, listen baby. It may be factual, it may be cruel, I ain't lying. Everybody plays the fool." - Aaron Neville

I asked The Execrable Bede for a special April Fool's Day song. Bede reminded me April is the Anniversary of Lady Day's birth in Philadelphia, PA, on April 7, 1915. 

Happy Birthday, Billie Holiday. We still listen to your Songs. We miss you. Rest in Love and Music.

Bede is one of the Authors who made this blog a success. Rest in Peace and Music. Read all of Bede's Beat.

Moscow Mitch in Song - GOODBYE!

Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. Some fools say to push on.

    UPDATE: Japan to Announce Fukushima Water Release Into Sea Soon

The Japanese government has decided to dispose of massive amounts of treated but still radioactive water stored in tanks at the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant by releasing it into the Pacific Ocean, local media say, a conclusion widely expected but delayed for years amid protests and safety concerns.

By Associated Press, Wire Service Content April 9, 2021

More

Japan’s environmental Minister calls for closing down all nuclear reactors to prevent another disaster like Fukushima.

“We will be doomed if we allow another nuclear accident to occur.” - Shinjiro Koizumi

Japan’s new environmental minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, called Wednesday for permanently shutting down the nation’s nuclear reactors to prevent a repeat of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, comments that came just a day after Koizumi’s predecessor recommended dumping more than one million tons of radioactive wastewater from the power plant into the Pacific Ocean.

Russia is sending a nuclear reactor to the Arctic. Russia just had a serious nuclear explosion. Five nuclear scientists died.

I do not think we need any country to build more nuclear reactors. We need to abandon them. We need to shut down existing reactors and build no more. 

The Music and the Scientist are here to tell you why we must do that. I put the Science first.

"Proponents of nuclear power often bill the option as a panacea to the impending climate crisis, arguing that it is a clean alternative to a carbon-reliant industry. Kate Brown, professor of science, technology and society at MIT specializing in environmental and nuclear history, says the full story is far more complex. "The thing that keeps me up at night is the health effects," she says. Brown, who has spent five years researching the fallout and lasting repercussions of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, adds that "to this day when people tell you we have no evidence of low-dose exposures cause harm to human health, that is because that big study was never done." - Democracy Now. 

A Tribute to Pete Seeger (1919-2014)

"Pete Seeger was a giant of our time. Growing up in a musical family, he had a long and productive career as a folk song leader and social activist. His father was the musicologist Charles Seeger, and his mother Constance was a classical violinist. At one point during his youth, Seeger and his brothers traveled extensively with their parents, entertaining communities throughout the countryside. When he was sixteen, he accompanied his father to Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s folk festival in Asheville, North Carolina. It is there that he first encountered the banjo and fell in love with it." - Folkways

Resurrection and Redemption

This year Easter falls on April Fool's Day. The Roman Catholic Church is asking disaffected American Catholics to come home. 

Come home to what? Sexual shame? Mutilation and possible death in childbirth as a social good? Get in line and vote for Traitor Trump like all your hypnotized Sheep? American Catholics put the Stooge of Darkness in the Oval Office. 

I will not count the ways the RCC has abandoned and tormented me. Sufficient to say I did not give my children to the RCC for spiritual education.

I know I will come home when they make a plate for me at the table. And smile when I sit down. And apologize for treating a poor young unwed Catholic Mother as though she was beyond the pale, not worth speaking to, or worthy of assistance - me. And I rejected the illegal abortion my Catholic Mother offered me.

I reject the Atonement. I am responsible for my own sins. I am responsible for my own redemption. I would never seek to profit from the torture death of any being - god, human, or animal. Got room for me now?

The long-awaited second Southern Gospel Revival EP has finally been released.
The project, which is a follow-up to the first one that was released in 2012, reunites Courtney Patton, Drew Kennedy, Jamie Lin Wilson and Ben and Micah Hester. Each recording was completed in one take, with no overdubs. Songs include 'When They Ring Those Golden Bells,' 'Take Your Shoes Off Moses,' 'By the Riverside' and 'I Can't Even Walk.'

Veteran's Day

The Latin in this poem means: "Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country."
(From Horace, Odes, III. ii. 13)

2nd Lt, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, 5th Bn. Manch. R., T.F., attd. 2nd Bn.
Awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in the attack on the Fonsomme Line on October 1st/2nd, 1918. On the company commander becoming a casualty, he assumed command and showed fine leadership and resisted a heavy counter-attack. He personally manipulated a captured enemy machine gun from an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallantly.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!
--An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

- by Wilfred Owen

 Benjamin Britten's War Requiem incorporating the poetry of Wilfred Owen.

Dirty Blues Sunday #1

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

I had no idea this genre of the Blues existed. I have always loved the Blues. I saw BB King in person from a box near the stage in Madison Square Garden. 

Now, that I know about Dirty Blues, I am going to share some of it with you.

Thomas A. Dorsey

Dirty Blues is about taboo subjects and was played only on jukeboxes. Too dirty for the airwaves. Sex and marijuana?

The Sun is finally shining. I am feeling good. I have to do something until the Bodega opens and I can get some coffee. No one had time to stop at the Reading Terminal Market.

This is Rosetta Howard from Chicago. Singing with Harlem Hamfats. Her songs are still on sale here. In the 1950s she sang with Thomas A. Dorsey at the Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago. Both Rosetta Howard and Harlem Hamfats transition between Swing and Blues. Jukebox music. Dancing Music.

78: Decca Sepia Series No.15. Rosetta Howard vocal, accomp. by the Harlem Hamfats

Despite their name, the "Harlem" Hamfats were a Chicago band in the 1930's whose members came from various places; for example, the McCoy brothers hailed from Mississippi, Herb Morand, John Lindsay and Odell Rand were from New Orleans and Horace Malcolm and Freddy Flynn came from Chicago. This is The Weed Smoker's Dream.

TROLL DISAPPOINTED

“. . . it's dangerous to fool yourself into believing the online world is 'virtual' and the person behind the keyboard can't inflict real-life harm.”
― Ginger Gorman, Troll Hunting: Inside the World of Online Hate and its Human Fallout

“Certainly it constitutes bad news when the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit.”
― Philip K. Dick

Although it may not be obvious at first, your Troll has a goal. Never give it satisfaction or success once you have figured out what it wants. The simplest and best response of all is NO THANK YOU.

Do not feed Trolls. Take this aphorism to the maximum. Do not feed political Trolls and Ivanbots on social media. Peace must begin here at home where we live and have our being. I thought this Talk was useful. 

That said, I must admit I Troll the Internet. My Jessica said "Face it, Mom. You are a Troll." Yeah, well I am a Troll for Good. If you want to beat them, join them. 

Democratic Attitude Adjustment

Democrats, take note. The time for collegiality is over. Fight unrelentingly against all Trump/Republican nominees and initiatives. Total war and no quarter.

Tell us the truth. Speak truth to power. Jesus wept, be rude once in a while. Trumpus won in part on every one's disgust for the politically correct.

Time all you mofos in Executive Branch and Congress get regularly and randomly drug tested. Sauce for the poor workingman must be sauce for you Suits. Why? You seem incapable of seeing reality - or unwilling. Undignified you say? Stop disrespecting the American people. Why cannot Americans have what Congress critters have?

Do you Bubbletonians not get it that the whole country is sick unto death of the Repubocrat Dempublican Party.

I have been a Democrat my whole voting life. Fight like berserkers or I am Independent. Some of you fuckers voted for Pompeo who is willing, like Bush-Cheney, to make all of us war criminals again. No torture. And respect First Nation land.

If Trump et al and you are going to kill me, I will burn down the whole fucking thing first. Fuck you NSA. It is hyperbole, FBI. Fascism terrifies the fuck out of me. I knew somebody with the numbers on his arm. Mr. Wolstein RIP. 

And now the National Anthem. God, if you send fucking Trumpus a fucking heart attack and fucking kill the bastid, I promise I will never say FUCK again. Maybe.

Bede's Beat - April 15 marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Abraham Lincoln in 1865

In 1942, Aaron Copland's mind was on the past and the present, because he was commissioned by André Kostelanetz write a piece about an "eminent American" for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra,

Copland -- like Kurt Weill, who was contemporaneously setting several of Walt Whitman Civil War poems to musical accompaniment -- turned to the figure of Lincoln as a means of explaining to his countrymen precisely what they were fighting for in battle against the Axis.

The result was The Lincoln Portrait a work written for full orchestra with narrator. Over the years, many famous actors and Americans have performed the Lincoln Portrait, including Henry Fonda (with Copland himself conducting), Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, James Earl Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, Marian Anderson, Katherine Hepburn, Esther Rolle, Vincent Price, Walter Cronkite, Carl Sandburg (in a performance that won a Grammy), Gore Vidal, Margaret Thatcher, Neil Armstrong, Julius "Dr. J" Erving and Adlai Stevenson.

Carl Sandburg with André Kostelanetz conducting the New York Philharmonic [winner of the 1959 Grammy for "Best Performance – Documentary Or Spoken Word (Other Than Comedy)"

I Need Attitude Adjustment - Oh Happy Day!

Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be. - Abraham Lincoln

Hallelujah! Judge Pitman's Opinion with Music and Fireworks

The Music appropriately begins with Taps.

Farewell to the Texas Abortion Law.
Text of Order
Art by Favianna Rodriguez

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Texas to suspend the most restrictive abortion law in the U.S., calling it an “offensive deprivation” of a constitutional right by banning most abortions in the nation’s second-most populous state since September.

The order by U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman is the first legal blow to the Texas law known as Senate Bill 8, which until now had withstood a wave of early challenges. In the weeks since the restrictions took effect, Texas abortion providers say the impact has been “exactly what we feared.”

In a 113-page opinion, Pitman took Texas to task over the law, saying Republican lawmakers had “contrived an unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme” by leaving enforcement solely in the hands of private citizens, who are entitled to collect $10,000 in damages if they bring successful lawsuits against abortion providers who violate the restrictions.

The law, signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in May, prohibits abortions once cardiac activity is detected, which is usually around six weeks, before some women even know they are pregnant.

Comic Relief in the Time of Trump. Hat Tip to Gabriel García Márquez.- UPDATE

UPDATE: Thank you, President Biden for ending forever War. I can take a deep breath now. We can have nice things now. We must clean house now. Remember this: -------------> ----------->

Published 12-26-17

READY FOR WAR? 

I am ready for and need some comic relief. Maybe you do too? So I posted the funny stuff first.

If you have reached peak rage too, just skip the editorial shyte below and stick with the laughs. I am getting so scared and angry that I am too distressed to read more than a few pages at a time.

The first video is just evil. I do not find the pelvic thrust convincing. But videos are like assholes; everybody has one.

US military leaders have sent an ominous warning to American troops to be prepared, saying the enemy is ‘watching you.’ General Robert Neller pointed to the near future possibility of Russia and the Pacific theatre being the next major areas of conflict and said a “big ass fight” was on the way, reports military.com.
Read more by Patrick Knox... 

When have we not been at war since Vietnam? War is why we cannot have CHIPS, speed controls on our trains, decent airports, bridges that are not going to fall any minute.

From Eugene Victor Debs, American Socialist Party candidate for POTUS:

As we have said, the bankers are for bullets—for the fool patriots that enlist at paupers' wages to stop the bullets, while the bankers clip coupons, boost food prices, increase dividends, and pile up millions and billions for themselves. Say, Mr. Workingman, suppose you have sense enough to be as patriotic as the banker, but not a bit more so. When you see the bankers on the firing line with guns in their hands ready to stop bullets as well as start them, then it is time enough for you to be seized with the patriotic itch and have yourself shot into a crazy-quilt for their profit and glory. Don't you take a fit and rush to the front until you see them there. They own the country and if they don't set the example of fighting for it, why should you?
As quoted in "American State Trials: A Collection of the Important and Interesting Criminal Trials which Have Taken Place in the United States, from the Beginning of Our Government to the Present Day", Vol. 13, 1921

PU^^Y CATS or GRANDMA WAS A DIRT - Dirty Blues Sunday #6

Some songs here are not Blues. Nothing wrong with a little Swinging Country dirt. According to Green's Dictionary of Slang, Parisian booksellers covered their seditious or obscene material with blue paper in 18th century. The first citation for blue meaning obscene comes from 1818. So I think I can sneak through a couple not so Blues but right on theme songs. 

Happy Juneteenth!

• 
  

  

  Homage to Ben Shahn

  Annee Robson

  Scarborough Art Gallery

  
  
  
  

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him. - Martin Luther King Jr. 

 

Sweet Honey in the Rose

The Old Design Shop provides the illustration from Flower Children, The Little Cousins of The Field and Garden by Elizabeth Gordon published in 1910. My title is a hat tip to Sweet Honey in Rock. One of their songs below.

June is Rose Month. I am off on a quest only a Mad Gardener and dedicated Foody would attempt. I am going to make this Rose Honey. My quest? Find a good source of unsprayed Pink Roses. I will make and taste this. I must.

This recipe comes from Gourmets for McGovern. I reproduce it verbatim. The Colophon reads "This cookbook has been peacefully and lovingly put together by volunteers for McGovern." I wrote the article at dkos. That article gave birth to this article. 

"According to The Pittsburgh Press Sept. 16, 1972: "Philadelphian Joan Cantor has written a cookbook 'Gourmets for McGovern,' to raise money for the senator's presidential campaign. The 46 page book contains such recipes as 'Mexican Drunken Chicken' and 'peaches poached in apricot sauce' -- all composed by local ladies. The national campaign headquarters has ordered 100,000 copies which it hopes to sell at $2 each." Printed on multi-colored cardstock and illustrated throughout with line drawings presumably done by the same "local ladies," the book includes Cantor's excellent recipe for Banana Cake re-blogged by Cooking with Kos May 31, 2015." - description Abe Books.

HONEY

from Kathy Weinerman

5 pounds Sugar

1-1/2 pints hot water (sic)

alum (about the size of a cherry)

20 red clover blossoms

12 white clover blossoms

8 pink roses

Melt sugar in the water. Add alum and boil 2 minutes. Remove pot from the flame and immediately add the petals of the blossoms and the roses and let stand 10 minutes. Strain and bottle. Try it, you'll like it!

 

Seems right to publish this unfinished article by Bede : Return of the Big Guns

When the Skatalites reformed in the mid-1980s, they released an incredible album, Return of the Big Guns, which -- for the first time -- gave those of us who never saw them when they were in the process of helping create modern Jamaican music, a chance to hear in high-fidelity what they must've sounded like from the bandstand:

Sunday with Screamin' Jay Hawkins

Man speaks to my condition. Constipation Blues is about pain. I cannot stand Boss Tweet's face and voice. What he says and does makes me sick in heart and mind. And Boss Tweet has not gone away yet. Not yet. 

Hawkins is a Blues singer with an operatic range. Some folks say this is rock and roll. Nah. Some folks say it is early Shock Rock. I agree. Man is so hard to catalog. He Screamin' Jay.

I am building this post. If you love Screamin' Jay and you got something to say, say it loud. We need to know who is backing Hawkins up here.

Do I have to point out what brilliant satire his work is? Nah.

The Easter Suite by Oscar Peterson

Happy Easter!

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land;
Song of Solomon 2:11-12

Oscar Emmanuel Peterson, (August 15, 1925 – December 23, 2007) was a Canadian jazz pianist and composer. He was called the "Maharaja of the keyboard" by Duke Ellington, but simply "O.P." by his friends. He released over 200 recordings, won eight Grammy Awards, and received numerous other awards and honours. He is considered one of the greatest jazz pianists, and played thousands of concerts worldwide in a career lasting more than 60 years. Read more about his life...

"Though the Easter Suite is regarded by some as one of this jazz legend’s great works, it remains unknown to many still today. Commissioned by The South Bank Show and first broadcast live on Good Friday 1984, this instrumental work depicts events from the gospel story. The Peterson Trio is on top form, with Peterson in particular displaying wonderful musicianship in the last movement, He Has Risen." - Graham Ross 

More Easter music here...